Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

Send us Fan Mail
For a long time, I made small changes to my brew and tasted nothing. In this episode, I talk about why incremental tweaks, the kind every recipe and every guide tells you to make, are often the worst way to actually learn your coffee. I walk through why pushing to the extremes, brewing something intentionally over-extracted and then intentionally under-extracted, teaches your palate more in ten minutes than weeks of tiny adjustments ever will. I also share a real example from my own bar this week, dialing in a new dark roast, and connect it to a lesson I picked up years ago on an autocross track.
You'll learn why your palate struggles to register small changes, how to use the extremes on purpose to find your reference points faster, and why the incremental fine-tuning that everyone tells you to start with is actually where you end up, not where you begin. If you've ever felt frustrated dialing in a new bag of coffee, or wondered whether you're actually tasting anything different at all, this episode gives you a simpler, more honest way to explore it.
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

Send us Fan Mail
For the past couple of weeks I've been sitting with Kenyan coffee and a Costa Rican natural, roasting them light, medium, and dark, and being honest with myself: they're just not doing it for me. In this episode I talk through what it feels like to drink a coffee everyone says you're supposed to love and walk away unmoved. I get into that familiar winey character in Kenyans, the way fruit in naturals hits hard and then fades into something empty, and why understanding a coffee matters more than forcing yourself to enjoy it.
More than tasting notes, this is about the mindset behind specialty coffee. I talk about industry pressure, baristas and competitions telling you what you'll experience, Reddit opinions becoming your identity, and why none of that should be the main recipe for your palate. You'll learn how to tell honest self-assessment apart from second-guessing, and why trusting your own walk with coffee, even when it goes against the crowd, is the real skill worth building. If you've ever wondered whether something's wrong with you for not liking the "right" coffee, this one is for you.
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

Send us Fan Mail
In this episode, I walk through a water chemistry experiment I ran on a light roast Kenyan coffee I roasted myself. For a long time, I've been playing this game of trying to coax sweetness out of light roast by pulling every lever available. I've swapped brewers, played with paper filters, dialed down temperature, and manipulated water chemistry. This time, I took it further. I tested three water profiles side by side on the same coffee: distilled, acidic, and a sweet-profile build. The distilled version was flat and unremarkable. The acidic version was lively, expressive, and the one I couldn't stop going back to. The sweet profile worked almost too well. Chocolatey, sweet, and completely stripped of everything that made the coffee interesting. The acidity was gone. The personality was gone. I realized I'd gone too far, and that realization opened up a bigger question about what we're actually doing when we manipulate coffee.
The deeper conversation in this episode is about losing sight of the coffee itself in the middle of all the tools, gear, and variables we use. I'm talking about the moment when the experimentation stops being in service of the coffee and starts being about winning an argument with it. By listening to this episode, you'll hear how one experiment shifted the way I think about light roast and why I'm starting to believe the acidity was never the problem to fix. You'll also come away with a genuine question to sit with the next time you brew: are you working with the coffee, or are you trying to change what it fundamentally is?
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

Send us Fan Mail
I bought another brewer. I saw people talking about the Pulsar Mini dripper online, felt the pull of missing out on something, and ordered it. It sat in the box for a couple of days while I waited for the right moment to open it. Then I did what I always do. I studied the construction, refused to read the directions, brewed a Honduras I already know well, and tasted it. It tasted like my V60. A little less roundness in the middle, which is typical for me with immersion brews. And then I set it down. In this episode I walk through that whole loop honestly, and I ask the question underneath it. Is that the goal?
What you will learn here is why coffee gear so often ends up as an ornament on the shelf, and what you are actually buying when you buy it. The coffee does not care how you brew it. It is what it is. So the real product is not the flavor unlock the marketing promised, it is the comparison, the noticing, the deconstruction. I make the case that you can get all of that from one brewer you have truly mastered, quirks and weaknesses included. I also make the case that if you want to keep buying, that is fine too, as long as you know why. This is about coffee gear FOMO, mastering a single pour over dripper, and being honest about what a piece of equipment does for you versus what you think it does for you.
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

Send us Fan Mail
In this episode, I dig into the one variable in coffee that almost nobody accounts for: ourselves. I've spent the past couple of weeks drinking a Costa Rican natural and a Kenyan light roast, and no matter how I roasted them or brewed them, they just weren't doing it for me. Instead of blaming the coffee, the water, or the brewer, I started asking a harder question. What if the coffee didn't change? What if I did? I walk through my own palate journey, from drinking light roasts on a bad grinder with tap water, to chasing bright acidity and in-your-face fruit, to where I am now, fond of medium and dark roasts and chasing sweetness over acidity.
I use the boiled Brussels sprouts you hated as a kid and love as an adult to explain why your taste evolves whether you notice it or not. I talk about how easy it is to see change across twenty years but how blind we are to it across a single year. By the end, you'll understand why your favorite coffee can quietly stop working, why that is not a bad thing, and how to identify whether your shifting preferences are about the cup or about you. If you've ever wondered why a coffee you loved suddenly falls flat, this episode gives you a framework for figuring out what actually changed.
Support the show
For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans